Assumptions
by Shadowed Mediocrity
Summary: He had never thought of her as the married type- had never thought of anyone in “their group” as the type to be tied down. There was something so terribly.. -permanent- about marriage. [Seto x Téa x Joey]
1. Téa and Confusion

Assumptions

**Summary**: A series of suppositions and assumptions leads Kaiba to make the biggest mistake of his life.. [One-sided Seto-Téa][One-shot; may grow longer, depending]

**Disclaimer**: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh. I'd like to, but sadly I don't.

**Author's Note**: I'm not sure about how plausible this is, but it popped into my mind after reading "A Wheeler Wedding", and watching Kaiba lose his scowl at the ceremony. And then, I began to wonder- if there had been a Seto/Anzu pairing, how would he have felt about the matter?

* * *

"I'm getting married, Seto." Her features, flushed with the exertion of pride and joy, their lovely, delicate structure seeming all the more porcelain-fragile as she spoke. Eyes of translucent lapis lazuli gazed at him, shimmering with the quietly restrained elation that had ever been her manner. How ironic could it be that she was so beautiful in a moment when he was too distracted to see it?

"I see." How distant his voice sounded- as though a thousand miles away from its speaker. He was uncertain as to how he appeared to her- certainly he didn't feel anywhere near normal. But then again, he supposed that he should have seen this particular setting coming; she had been chattering about him for months, with a steadily mounting giddiness that he had formerly left alone, uncomprehending.

He understood it only too well now.

She went on as though she hadn't noticed his distraction- and perhaps she hadn't- her smile growing all the wider as she spoke. "He's been so sweet these past few months- he's been waiting on me forever to notice that he loved me, he said.." She whirled carelessly, a spinning dance upon the pavement that caused the passersby to give her odd looks, but to make no comment. It was as though they, too, sensed the ecstatic joy that pulsed within her heart, and were disinclined to shatter it- as disinclined as Seto himself.

Pausing, she glanced down at him. "Isn't that sweet?" She inquired.

"Sweet, of course." He answered blankly._ And the fact that I've been waiting for years means absolutely nothing, I suppose_.

He heard her chattering on and on about the wedding arrangements, but his hearing functions had thankfully shut down, leaving him to run on auto-pilot while he contemplated her news.

Married!

Ethereal, fleeting Téa Gardner, married!

He had never thought of her as the married type- had never thought of anyone in "their group" as the type to be tied down. An informal arrangement, yes, but there was something so terribly.. _permanent_ about a marriage. For all that divorces were often employed in these present days, there was still some sacrosanct quality left to a marriage..

And she would be joined in it- to another man. To the _Mutt_.

Briefly, he wondered, tapered fingers drumming absentmindedly against the laptop that he had brought to their old meeting place, how Yugi felt upon the matter. And whether he, Seto, would have been less thunderstruck by her statement, had it been his old rival that she had agreed to marry.

To some extent, he almost wished that she _would_ come to her senses and marry Yugi. For from the multiple losses that he had suffered at the younger duelist's hands, there had arisen a grudging respect- an outlook that proclaimed him Seto's equal.

Wheeler, on the other hand, had never gained such a respect.

"..had to come and tell you here, because it felt right." Her words abruptly tore through his mind, and he glanced up, to notice that she was beaming down at him attentively. "You know, since we've been meeting here all that time.."

Ah.. she was referring to the first time that they had met here- at this particular corner. The school had set a ridiculous monthly assignment- to walk around the city and to write a poem, or piece of prose, upon the thoughts that rose through their mind during that jaunt.

Naturally, Fate would have it that he collided into the young brunette at the first opportunity.

They had jumped apart immediately, glared at each other, made a few snide remarks- he had, at least- and rapidly departed each other's company. And the next day, during their literature class, had discovered that the both of them had come up for the precise same third line for their 'city poems'.

It was far from being the auspicious beginning that most relationships commenced with.

As though to make matters worse, they began to encounter one another in a variety of crashes- all over the city, but most of all over the corner where they had first 'met'.

After the first five times that this 'accident' occurred, it began to be more humorous an event than anything- and an event that was expected, almost anticipated, on his part. And the words exchanged at such encounters began to be less antagonistic, more of a passing greeting. And when they met, the meetings would take longer.

He began to derive an odd pleasure from her company- she was so unlike him so as to utterly fascinate him. Her odd cheerfulness, the buoyancy of her manner- it served to uplift his day with a sleek pleasure that he could not derive from his company's rises and falls in stocks. And he began to realize that for all the dedication he put into KaibaCorp, the sole manner in which it could- and would- reward his devotion was with money, of which he possessed such a quantity so that it was entirely meaningless to him.

And so, portion by portion, he began to scrupulously transfer his attentions to Téa, but in such a slow fashion that she never noticed. He began to leave a single dark-chocolate truffle in her locker every day, as a standing joke between them- she had accused him of being like dark chocolate once, "bitter but rich, and an acquired taste"- but had never told her of it, assuming that she had known who had sent them to her. (Had Wheeler had the nerve to take credit for those? He wondered, fragments of acrimony permeating his thoughts. Or had he merely forbidden Téa to eat them?) And on her birthday, he spent hours poring over a profile that he had gathered of her, to select for her the perfect gift.

After they had left high school, she had kept in touch with him- a sign that he had taken all too hopefully- and had written him every week while they went to their separate universities.

And always, she had signed her letters _Love, Téa._

How he had agonized over those letters, particularly their conclusion, poring over them over and over, in search of some clue as to why he felt so torn by their words.. made so sleepless by their content. Téa didn't say things that she didn't mean- he knew that well enough, having spent sufficient time in her company to have realized this. But did that mean that her 'love' was more than platonic?

It had been Mokuba who had given him the final connection- lent him the realization that he had fallen in love.

"Either that," his younger sibling had stated, with a brow raise that looked much like his own, "or you have a dangerously stalker-like obsession that'll send you to the nearest therapist."

How he wished, now, that it had only been the latter.

Realizing that the inundation of speech had been given a pause for him to speak, he smiled forcedly at the brunette. "I'm happy for you." He said, in a cool, disinterested voice that sounded horribly unlike his own. Out of courtesy, he asked another question. "When's the wedding?"

Her joy-saturated gaze had begun to waver, as though uncertain of him. "Three weeks from now." She said at last, but no longer was there that charming, vivid note in her voice. "Seto.. are you all right?"

"I'm fine." He responded brusquely, but her announcement had delivered a new shock to his veins. _Three weeks_..

"Oh, good.." She chose to take his words at face-value, rather than interpreting the tone that he had delivered them with. "I was wondering.. would you like to be best man? Please?" The beseeching air had returned to her eyes, and there was a loving profundity to her gaze that told him he could not refuse her.

She was getting married, and he was still unable to deny her a single request.

"Why?" He could not prevent a sardonic, cutting edge from entering his voice. "Did the mu—Wheeler request me? He didn't seem like the type."

"No.. he wanted Yugi to be present." And now there was a fleeting, pained element to her gaze. "He.. he didn't notice that.." She didn't need to finish the phrase- he had already grasped the concept, and that comprehension was within his steady gaze.

_He didn't notice that Yugi was in love with Téa._ But Téa, with only the best of intentions in her heart, had wanted to spare Yugi that trial.. unknowingly setting his burden onto the back of one with the same dilemma.

_Now_. His mind urged him. _Tell her, before she gets married and all is lost. Tell her that you love her, that you always have.._

And perhaps he might have, if he hadn't seen the look in her eyes as she continued onwards, to speak of the mutt and his saccharine appeal in dealing with her. He had seen that drifting expression within his own gaze all too often to mistake it for anything else other than love. And who was he to interfere in her love?

_Wheeler had better be worth this.._

"Yes." He said abruptly.

"Yes, what?" The silence between them had stretched to such a length that it seemed as though all conversation between them had turned obsolete..

"Yes, I'll be best man. That's what you were asking for, wasn't it?"

"Oh.." And she flung her arms around him, burying her face in the nape of his neck. He stiffened instinctively, but unlike the other times that she had given him her spontaneous embraces, he did not relax again. The sole desire within his mind now was searing its mark into his thoughts- to get away from her and her unconscious cruelty. "Thank you.." She breathed. "You don't know how much this means to me."

_But I do_.._ and that's what makes it worse._

* * *

**Author's Note: **I know I ended on a bit of an awkward note- I've never been particularly good with endings. I also loathe the potentiality of this one-shot- like my other one (which, unsurprisingly, is also Seto/ Téa-centric), it has the potential to turn into a full-fledged novel, but I'm not sure if I want it to turn into one.

Again, tell me what you think..


	2. Dreams and Joey's Worst Nightmare

Assumptions

**Summary**: A series of suppositions and assumptions leads Kaiba to make the biggest mistake of his life.. (One-sided Seto-Téa) (Seto x Téa x Joey)

**Disclaimer: **If I owned Yu-Gi-Oh, the first thing I'd do would be to steal Kaiba's silver and/or purple trenchcoat from the show. The second thing I'd do would be to steal Kaiba himself.

So be glad I don't own the show. xP

**Author's Note:** I realize that Dream! Téa is rather out of character in this chapter- it's a deliberate move. Her face is used because it's the one that would affect Seto most, but the words are all Seto's own.

_**Chapter Two: Dreams and (Joey's) Worst Nightmare..**_

----

"_It's not fair!" He found himself saying, and there was a bitter anger to his words. "All I'd ever loved was you. Everything, every dream made real, it was buried in you. And now you belong to someone else.."_

_She was looking towards him incuriously, gaze bland, features set and cool. Silence rang like an audible entity between them, but it seemed, briefly, as though neither possessed strength enough to shatter that hush.. At last, however, she ventured to speak. "Maybe I loved you once, maybe not." She said, with a casual shrug, fitting it into its own category and dismissing all his passions as nothing. "But did you think that I loved you so much that I was going to wait forever? Even the strongest love can wear out."_

"_Love doesn't wear ou-"he began to say, but was cut off as the brunette tossed her hair slightly, laughter curving her lips into a bittersweet smile._

"_For someone so jaded," she said softly, "You certainly are naïve. Whatever love I had for you wore out in the years before you ever realized I existed as anything other than Yugi's cheerleader." She continued, conscientiously, ignoring the startlement that flitted across his features. "Wore out against the constant waiting, the agonizing silences that you fitted into my life. The measurements that I could see in your eyes, constantly checking to see my weaknesses, whether I was still weak, and what those weaknesses were. Mine wore out while you had your love affair with another version of the Duel Disk." A shimmering sadness had enveloped her sapphire gaze, hollowing its emotions until there was nothing other than a worthless grief for what might have been. "Where did you learn that what you wanted was for someone to hurt you, Seto?" She asked, and her voice was softened, a hush. "That's all you ever wanted- for someone to break you, so that you could pretend it was love. And try as I might, I couldn't break you. I broke myself and everything I ever felt for you against the indifference you hold for everyone you don't care for, until even the pieces I kept on putting back together were gone."_

"_Then it wasn't love." He said, and there was an uncharacteristic fierceness in his anger. "It wasn't- I should know, I've-"_

_She cut him off again- how assertive these dream-selves were!- with a soft outburst of breath. "Seto.." She said softly, and there was the slightest of melodious lilts to the way she pronounced his name. Abruptly, she was before him, gazing upward, meeting his eyes with her own translucent cerulean. "It was love." She said softly, so softly that he could barely feel the rustle of her breath upon its skin. "It was love.." She repeated, with the certainty of sadness. A single finger moved upwards, to trace the sharply defined planes of his visage. He hadn't noticed that he was bending closer to her, their lips so close that a single casual movement would bring them together. But she moved past him, to breathe a last whisper in his ear.._

"_And now it's gone."_

He woke abruptly, tangled in the bedsheets, the silken slide of their material granting him little comfort, aside from the luxury that they provided. Luxury.. he had been stifled by it from the moment that he had won his challenge against the man who had been his stepfather. What good had it done him in the years that had followed? Everything that had ever mattered had been snatched from his grasp before he could even wake to recognize their worth..

Lips parted, Seto Kaiba stared outwards, gaze curiously blank in the darkness, head cocked slightly to the side, as though he searched for something that he was no longer certain would be there.

A tentative stirring rose from the shadows, and despite the fantasy that roamed his thoughts, the absurdity of that theory, his heart rose for a moment..  
  
"Big Brother?"

.. and was shattered alongside the silence by that softened, adolescent rumble. Mokuba had grown to become as close a confidante as Seto could trust himself with, but even he could not be everything.. He did not possess the transiently hypnotic sapphire to his gaze that haunted Seto through every sleeping and waking hour. His was not the smile that the young CEO unconsciously sought within every visage.

"What is it, Mokuba?" His usual, half-grating tenor floated from amidst the velvet darkness, with not even the thinnest beam to illuminate a path. The drapes had- as always- been pulled firmly shut- Seto could rarely abide the sight of moonlight- too often, it represented the romantics and dreamers that he so despised.. "Is there something wrong?" With uncanny receptiveness, he could hear his brother's ragged breathing, could imagine the widely-drawn eyes as he sought to control those signs of weakness.

"N-not much." The younger boy managed to say at last, and his brother sensed that this was less from panic than from indecision upon what to tell the young CEO. Wordlessly, even as he greeted his brother's innate dislike of confessing weaknesses to him with reluctant sadness, he approved of Mokuba's instinctive thought. "I just.. had a nightmare, and wanted to go down to the kitchens.. and I heard you tossing." Unspoken remained the implication, _And I thought you might be having one too.._ But Mokuba had learned- he would never be so unsubtle as to confess that directly, now.

"Well, I'm fine." Seto said, a little too empathetically, perhaps, but either way, Mokuba understood that the subject was forbidden. Nevertheless, the elder Kaiba could all but sense him hesitating within the darkness.

"Big brother.." Some reluctance discolored his sibling's tone, and perversely, Seto was irritated by this expression of concern. "What?"

"Could you come down to the kitchens with me..?"

The slightest of sighs escaping the darkness was the elder Kaiba's sole answer, but Mokuba knew it to be a sign of assent- however reluctant. Safely draped within the cloak of darkness, he smiled with the guileless innocence of his childhood. Whether Seto knew it or not, he needed this midnight trip to the kitchens just as much as Mokuba himself did- the younger Kaiba could hear it within the weary tones of his brother's voice.

Even if Seto _wasn't_ being haunted by a big blue monster who insisted on devouring cookies with a lousy voice-over.

----

"He agreed to be the best man!" She sang out as she entered the apartment that they now shared. The door shut behind her with a subtle _click _and she smiled to hear the sound. It was the sound of reassurance, and regardless of the image she had projected, Téa had always been interested in her safety. With fond amusement, she noticed the scattered traces of food and general chaos that indicated that he was home- Joey never could pass a room without making a mess out of everything in it. It was, she reflected, one of his more endearing traits- and perversely, one of his more irritating ones. After all, she cleaned the apartment up every morning.. and in the afternoon, it would look precisely as it had the day before. It was as though the room had grown adjusted to her fiancée's odd ways, and automatically gravitated towards it.

"Who? Yugi?" A familiarly anarchic blond head popped up from the other side of the couch, its owner's eyes sleep-bleared and apparently exhausted. "Good, now can ye figure out how much he's grown or somethin', because dese sizes are very confusin', an'-"

"Don't be silly, Joey." She scolded, but there was the familiar lightness within her voice- he could incite that feeling within her, of bubbly joy, and she loved it. It made her more true to what she constantly strove to be, and buried the cynicism that often hovered oh-so-near her surface.. Still laughing, the brunette gave a small, graceful whirl, pausing elegantly, poised in a fragile motion. "I meant Seto, of course!"

A crash and the abrupt disappearance of the blond's head told her that he'd fallen on the floor. Alarmed, she darted over to check on his state, but he appeared to be fine, albeit cringing somewhat. "Whaaaat?" He demanded incoherently. "You asked _Kaiba_ to da wedding?"

She blinked, mildly offput by his response. "Well, yes." She responded. "You said that I could ask him-"

"_After_ Hell freezes over, sweetheart." Joey interrupted, voice heavily laden with irony. "No freakin' way I'd tell you it was okay to as-"He paused as he mentally reviewed the events of the previous night, and began to glare at his betrothed as he realized that they were far and few in between. The fact that she was beginning to look conspicuously innocent aided that thought. "Don't tell me youse gots me drunk to get me to say it?"

Her apparent innocence persisted. "Of course not." She responded, demeanor one of great offense. _I didn't need to get you drunk, love._ She added mentally. _All I need to do is put a bottle of wine out on the table, and only put out one glass. Naturally you'd drink most of it._

Joey continued to glower at her with an air of suspicion, until finally Téa sighed and relented. "Yes, but only slightly." She said reluctantly, holding out index finger and thumb to demonstrate a modicum. "But.." And she deftly retrieved a paper from her pocket, "It's still binding!" She proclaimed, waving the document in Joey's astonished face with an expression that, upon anyone else's features, would have been deemed irrepressibly smug.

"But I was drunk!" He protested, scrabbling for any straws that would support him. "Surely dat can't count!"

Silently- and holding back giggles- she showed him the sub clause.

He glared at her. "I'm gonna get youse back for this." He said at last, in a low, growling tone she assumed was supposed to be menacing. "I don't know how, but I swear I will."

Playfully, she stuck her tongue out at him, and ran out of the room, heart singing with pleasant contentment, before he could catch up to her. "Don't fuss so much, Joey." She laughed, awaiting him in order to ambush him with a pillow from around the corner. "Seto's a very nice person- I swear you two would get along like a house on fire if only you'd get off your high horses and talk to each other properly."

"Yeah, yeah, like a house on fire." Joey grumbled as he furtively peeked around the corner that did not contain Téa behind it; a fact that became immediately apparent as he crept past it, hoping to catch her off-guard. "There might even be no survivors."

She only laughed in response, sweet voice echoing throughout the apartment.

"And since when do you call him Seto, anyway?" Not that they'd actually talked much about Kaiba- the blond boy had been too busy attempting to clumsily court Téa to discuss one of his biggest rivals with her. It wasn't as though he dragged posters of Kaiba and mustached them on his dates with Téa- even if Joey wasn't terribly experienced in the ways of dating, he knew that _that_ was one of the big no-no's. "Seto." He muttered under his breath, glancing dubiously at the next corner. "What kind of a stupid girly name is that? And those vests he wears—ugh!"

"Speak for yourself, Mr. Same-Green-Coat-For-Six-Years-Running." Téa retorted, grinning, shoulders tense as she awaited Joey's turning. "And we've always been on good terms, ever since senior year, about. Ran into each other on a city corner- literally!- and I guess things just kind of flowed from there." She squealed in laughter and surprise as her fiancée abruptly tackled her from beyond the corner, and promptly began tickling her. They were both so childish at times- it was hardly a wonder that they'd found each other, she thought, even as she fought off said childish fiancée's advances. Yugi, for all that he looked the most like a pre-pubescent out of any of them, had never truly been a child from the moment that his other side had been awakened. It was one of the things that had fascinated Téa about him; but then, she had always been slightly obsessed with the concept of innocence.

Ever since she had tried to embody it herself..

"Things kinda flowed from there, huh?" Joey's skeptical face loomed above her, seriousness etched upon his features. He had stopped tickling her by then, letting her catch her breath while he wasted it by questioning her. "So tell me, how good of friends were you and dat Kaiba?"

"It was just the usual stuff, Joey, nothing much." She shrugged expressively. "We wrote each other in college, kept in touch after that.. Oh, and he kept mailing me dark chocolates- it was hilarious."

The duelist's eyes narrowed as his mind zoomed in upon an incident he thought was more catagorizable. Mailing chocolates? To _his_ fiancée?!

"Don't _worry_, Joey." Téa added hastily, seeing his expression. "He didn't mean anything by it- it was just a private joke. We were comparing each other to things once, and I thought that he was most like bitter chocolate; bitter, with an afterthought of sweet, rich, and an acquired taste." _And dark._ She thought, but did not voice that thought; there were some things that she couldn't share. Not even with Joey, who seemed to elicit from her the desire to speak.. and speak.. until he knew every molecule of her that had ever existed.

He made her want to be the image that she had always lived up to being, and so he was loveable. But Seto..

Seto had reminded her of the darker parts of herself; that life was hardly ever the sunshine and flowers that Joey brought into her mind. And while she respected him for it, it was Joey she loved. For Joey was, unconsciously, the ideal that she had sought all along.. the ideal that she so desired to instill within herself.

The ideal that she had always been in her friends' minds.

"Huh." Joey had his own opinions about _that_.. but withheld them, for fear of inciting the brunette's wrath. For someone as bubbly and charming as Téa, she sure had a temper.

Still, he'd see that Kaiba about those chocolates later.. if he was _still_ sending them, then there would be trials and tribulations upon the Kaibas and seven generations down.

And woes betide anyone who tried to stop him.

(tbc..)

**Author's Note:** The lovely people who reviewed have proven to me that there's nothing like posting a second chapter to your second fic. Which means I should probably be updating Doich soon.. but it's still hovering on the boundaries of 'Should this become a chapter-fic? Or not?' Despite all the nice reviews I've acquired.

Still, thanks for all the lovely reviews! And I'm sorry this chapter's not quite as good as I wanted it to be, but it's already been a few weeks, and I wanted to get the next chapter out as soon as I could.. x.x

And just so people know about the pairings.. It may or may not be Seto/Téa. It might be Joey/Téa. Or, hell, as unlikely as I think it is, Seto/Joey. At first, I wanted a neat Seto/Téa-fic. But Téa and Joey just worked so sweetly together in this chapter.. The Seto/Joey bit was just out of sheer perversity (no, that doesn't mean I think it's perverted. PERVERSE. Just wanted to make that clear, due to some, ahem, incidents today.), since the only way I can even remotely imagine the two getting together would be through sheer, irresistible physical attraction. And a relationship based only on that can't last long. So yes.. it may be any of the three pairings above.

..Or I may just be saying all these things to taunt you people with the mysteriousness of it all. xP

So review, point out glitches in my story (since I don't have betas, and have no idea how to acquire them), flaws in my spelling, weak points in my writing style, etc.


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